


& they lived

by scioscribe



Category: True Detective
Genre: Domestic, Gen, Insecurity, Long-Distance Friendship, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-27
Updated: 2014-06-27
Packaged: 2018-02-06 11:14:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1856002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You gonna stop clucking over my wardrobe and ask the sixty thousand dollar question?”</p>
<p>“How you found me?  You’re a private investigator.  That ain’t worth sixty thousand dollars.”</p>
<p>“You know what you do?” Marty said.  “You just suck all the fun out of my life.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	& they lived

“So I’ve been thinking about putting an ampersand up,” Marty said.

Rust had finished off the French fries an hour ago but the way Marty’s voice sounded made him root around in the little paper cup like there was going to be more at the bottom. He turned up salt and a cold burnt sliver of potato. “Ampersand,” he said.

“Like one of those ‘and’ symbols.”

“I know what the word means, Marty.”

Marty squinted, like the next inevitable question was going to be why Rust was being such an asshole, but instead he said, “Hart & Cohle,” and the way he said it, Rust could _hear_ that knot of rope tying their names together, like Marty had sprung for the fancier ribbon after all.

Rust slicked one finger down the side of his McDonald’s cup. “I wasn’t planning on staying.”

“You got a job,” Marty said. “Shit, you’ve got two. I had you fill out tax forms.”

“Yeah, well, the other job doesn’t have tax forms.”

“Shit, the dive bar run by the mute sniper doesn’t pay its taxes, will wonders never fucking cease.”

“I’m serious,” Rust said.

“So am I.”

They still had the fast food remains spread out all over the desk like a split carcass and Marty had pinched about half of Rust’s fries. Rust wanted to sink into the incongruity of Marty talking loyalty and seventeen years with ketchup-stained napkins in front of them, but he’d proposed to Claire in the bed of his truck with his jeans still unbuttoned and so couldn’t be a hypocrite, pointing out the strangeness of how people chose the moments when they’d wed their lives together. And Marty was still talking, talking about loneliness and partnership, something about how they hadn’t gone through it all just to fuck it up again, and somewhere in it all he actually said “for better or worse.”

Rust cut him off. “I’m not your prize at the end of the game, Marty. Not the teddy bear you take home for getting the Ping-Pong ball in the bottle.”

“What is this, you want to feel valued? You want your name first on the door? You can have it, you territorial _shithead_ ,” and Marty’s face was brick-red, like Rust had gotten him out-of-breath. “We had seven good years.”

“We had six good years,” Rust said.

“Fine, we had six good years and one shitty one and I’m _sorry_ you got your feelings hurt I didn’t have your back on Reggie Ledoux.”

“Not that it’s an apology I’m looking for,” Rust said, “considering I did my fair share of bridge-burning, but if it was, I don’t think that’d satisfy.”

Marty breathed in and out of his nose like a bull. And then he just seemed old and Rust had to remember that the difference in years between them were a reverse bell-curve, more significant at the edges of their lives than they’d been in the middle. He almost put his hand on Marty’s and wrecked the whole thing. But then Marty said, “I know what I’ve fucked up, Rust. I knew it before we had to sit through those this-is-your-life interviews, but if I didn’t know it before then, I sure as shit knew it after. I know I don’t have the right to expect anything, not from Maggie or the girls. But from you—I thought you were saying yes. I mean, I’d do better. You lay ground rules, I’ll follow them. But stay, Rust.” He tried to smile but he didn’t quite get it right and Rust knew from long experience what that felt like from the inside: like trying to heave a barbell up with a jaw that wouldn’t stay firm. “I’m asking.”

He could have told Marty that it was all a long holdover from 2002, from Marty coming at him in the parking lot with his rings slid off his fingers, or from Marty saying Rust was making a simple thing complex just for the hell of it, or he could climb on the highest horse he could find and say it was about Maggie and him not trusting Marty to treat him any better. What he’d said to the cops, though, he’d meant: he wasn’t any good for people. Marty thought he was because Marty was so lonely he was trying to plug a round peg into a square hole and hope for the best. And Marty would be okay.

_Without me, there is no you_ , Rust had told him once, but shit, wouldn’t Marty have golf buddies and drinking buddies still? What did he need Rust for?

Whereas Rust needed Marty for everything and he couldn’t do that to him. And he couldn’t do their bad year over again to himself, couldn’t take Marty looking at him again like he didn’t really see him, because he’d realized what Rust was, everything Rust was, was unnecessary eighty percent of the time. It wasn’t about trust. It was about accepting that he wasn’t the kind of person anyone would hold onto. Besides, he’d relearned how to do things alone.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

And Marty had had expectations, after all, whatever he’d thought: Rust watched them wash out of his face like newsprint in the rain.

*

He went back to Alaska for the same reason he’d gone there the first time—the county was like a cemetery where he’d buried Marty in a thousand different places, like _there was the place they grabbed lunch that time Marty agreed Geraci was an asshole_ and _there was the gas station where he shoplifted the Hershey bar and Marty asked what the fuck was wrong with him_. Everything haunted.

He drove so he could smoke on the way. Once he didn’t bother with a motel and just pulled the car over to the side of the road, slept laid out in the back like an invitation. He woke up and he was still alive.

*

Marty turned up on his doorstep a year later, holding a six-pack and wearing the puffiest blue marshmallow of a parka Rust has ever seen. “What the fuck, man,” Rust said. He couldn’t get his mouth to lay down flat. “I ought to leave you out here to freeze.”

“There’s a motel down the road, you go that way,” Marty said. “But then you don’t get a free drink out of the deal.”

“Can’t pass up a chance like that,” Rust said, and moved his hip a little so Marty could get by. “Come inside then, asshole, you’re letting out all the heat.”

Marty came in and Rust scrutinized his gear, which was about the quality and level of stupidity he would expect from someone buying online off a checklist, and before they could get drunk, he dug some better socks out of his drawer. “You wear these back to your car,” he said. “And we go get you some better boots because those are going to leak snow in, ruin the whole point of the socks. The parka’s okay except for how it makes you look like something out of _Ghostbusters_.”

“Gun to my head, I would not have had any money on you having seen _Ghostbusters_ ,” Marty said. “You gonna stop clucking over my wardrobe and ask the sixty thousand dollar question?”

“How you found me? You’re a private investigator. That ain’t worth sixty thousand dollars.”

“You know what you do?” Marty said. “You just suck all the fun out of my life.”

“Says the man who stalked me all the way up to Alaska.”

“Hey, I said I’d leave. You were the one who dragged me in—”

“—no dragging—”

“—and started scrutinizing the finer details of my clothing. I stopped in to see an old friend.” But Marty was standing there now holding the parka by one cuff, the rest of it dangling to the floor like the world’s fattest snake. He said, more carefully, “I said last time I’d do better. If you want me to leave, I’m gone, and the next first move’s on you, you want to make it or not. God knows I don’t want to put you in Maggie’s shoes and have the two of you screwing each other for eternity just so I won’t buck for a reunion when all you want is to be gone. The way you left it, before, I figured maybe you just needed—space.” He shrugged. “So I left you all this butt-fuck cold and a year and thought I’d give it a shot.”

“See,” Rust said, “you think I’m the only one of us makes speeches, but that’s a speech.”

“Yeah, I cribbed half of it from the end of _Pretty Woman_ , got the rest from _Love Actually_. You want me to leave?”

“I want you to leave, I’ll tell you,” Rust said. “What you can do is fix the wireless. There’s only one provider up here and the service is shit. I’ll make us something to eat.”

Marty fixed the wireless and then came in to watch Rust cook and bitch about how Rust had thirty boxes of Hamburger Helper and almost nothing else and then insisted that he use the Cheeseburger Macaroni kind because that was Marty’s favorite. Rust considered kicking him out and instead made him fry up the hamburger. “Damn, it’s like high school all over again,” Marty said. “I ever tell you I worked in an Italian restaurant? I was nineteen before I stopped smelling like tomato sauce.”

After dinner, they got drunk. Rust made beer can people and whenever he left the room, Marty arranged them into complex fight scenes. Finally he took a hole-punch and some fishing line and strung them together until they were rappelling down the side of Rust’s coffee table and Rust decided he liked the look of it.

*

Marty stayed two weeks. At the end of them, he said, “You want to come back where you can take a walk without dying of hypothermia?”

“Living here’s not a stunt I’m pulling to make you chase after me,” Rust said.

“All I’m doing,” Marty said, “is asking. You good with me coming back next year?”

“It’s your airline points,” Rust said.

*

The next year, he made sure he got some fruit and a bag of salad so Marty wouldn’t throw a hissy fit about the way he was living.

The second time, Marty wore better boots. “Couldn’t ditch the coat you had such a hard-on for, though,” he said. “Gotta get that Rust Cohle smile. You bought peaches.”

“Yeah, they were expensive, too, so if you want a mint on your pillow, I’m fresh out.”

“I don’t need anything but your company,” Marty said.

That time he stayed for three weeks and Rust took him ice-fishing. Marty was decent at every part of it but tolerating the cold, so he ended up slouched against Rust the whole time, his blue parka rubbing against Rust’s black. “Did you do this with your wife?”

Rust shook his head. “We never lived anywhere cold enough. That was me—she wanted to see where I’d grown up, I was always the one who said no.”

“But you got to liking it up here,” Marty said.

“Not really. It’s just a place like any other. Familiarity’s an opiate, Marty, that’s why everything meant to calm people down’s always the same, and it’s soothing, till they wake up poisoned, realizing they were sold a bill of goods. The American Dream is staying in one place. Marry the one person. Hold down the one job, be a company man. You must be planning the rest of your life to come up here once a year and get a hit of it from me, live a little bit of familiar.”

“And you wanted to be alone,” Marty said quietly. “Like you’re not used to that enough you’ve got to wallow in it some more.”

“We all pick our poisons. I’m no better than anyone else.”

“I ought to tape-record that and play it back on loop, lull myself to sleep.”

“Anyway,” Rust said, “you don’t do me any good on an electro-chemical level. Nineteen years now and you still surprise me sometimes. And you’ve got a bite.”

“Motherfucker,” Marty said, trying to reel it in. “Fuck yeah. Get out the cornmeal when we get home and we’ll fry this bad boy right up.”

It turned out to be a license plate. Rust cracked every comment he could and insisted on keeping it, balanced it on his knees as he let Marty drive them back, all the while thinking about how Marty had called it _home_ and hadn’t noticed and wondering if he should make a thing out of it. He decided not to. Two days later, Marty was rolling his wheelie bag to the door like they were in some black-and-white movie that ended at a train station, and Rust almost said, “Then stay,” when Marty said, “You know, I can see why you like it here. Beyond the opiates. See you next year.”

*

“You bought me a blanket,” Marty said.

“There’s a flea market in town. I thought it would keep you quiet about the cold for at least fifteen minutes.”

“Looks homemade.”

“Yeah,” Rust said, because that was easier than saying, _I made it myself_.

“It’s got mountains on it.”

Rust fidgeted. “It’s just a skyline, Marty,” he said, and hoped Marty didn’t pay too much attention to the view from the back porch.

*

Whichever way he counted it, year four or year twenty-one, that was the year they fought like they hadn’t since the broken taillight.

It went on forever. Rust saying that Marty bulldozed over people with his one right way and that was why nobody, not even Rust, could stand to be around him 24/7; Marty saying that Rust never met a problem he didn’t want to run away from and how it must have been just amazing to have all those murders going on to give him an excuse to be a fucked-in-the-head hermit. Marty saying Rust had pulled away from him long before he’d pulled away from Rust and how maybe if he’d had a _little fucking support from his partner_ he wouldn’t have fucked that girl in 2002 and Rust saying that he could not believe the shit Marty would pull to not take responsibility for his own damn life. Marty saying that Rust used judgment like a knife to wave around and keep people away and Rust asking if that was from Dr. Phil or some other daytime shit-show Marty watched since he had nothing else to do.

They left it like that, except three months later Rust got an email from Marty, the only one he’d gotten since he moved:

_It wasn’t Dr. Phil, it was from a CBS movie about a cop, so SUCK IT, ASSHOLE._

_P. S. sorry_

_next year?_

Rust wrote back, _Next year’s nine months from now_ , and mailed Marty ESPN’s _30 for 30_ box set so he’d have something to watch that would be halfway decent.

*

Marty brought him one of Audrey’s paintings. “That style’s called mixed-media,” Marty said, like it was French and he’d only just learned to pronounce it.

“She gave it to you, she’ll want to see it at your place when she visits.”

Marty’s mouth twisted. “We mostly go other places. We have dinner. I’m not complaining,” he said, looking sideways at Rust like he was talking about more than one thing. “It’s better than it used to be, better than what I thought, a couple of years ago, I’d have by now. But she’s not gonna see it’s not at my place because she doesn’t go there, and I like to think of it being somewhere a little more lived-in.”

“A little more lived-in than your house,” Rust said.

“Hey,” Marty said, “I don’t give you shit about the way you’ve got more furniture every time I come around.”

“It’s decent,” Rust said, looking at the painting. “Can’t tell what it is, but I like it.”

“It’s better than decent,” Marty said. “That’s my daughter you’re talking about.”

“It’s a work of genius going to change the art world forever.”

“Now you’ve got it,” Marty said.

*

Marty lost what was left of his hair. Rust’s thinned a little more but mostly stayed the same. “You use something on this?” Marty asked, in as plaintive and hound-dog a voice as Marty had ever heard and Rust hated to disappoint him. So he bought special shampoo in a pearlescent bottle, some kind that smelled like cornhusker oil, and Marty used it for eight days before he figured out it was bullshit. Which was a decent stretch of time.

*

Rust got arthritis in his knuckles and his left hip. “I’m seeing a doctor,” he said, when Marty quizzed him about it and came up the next year with a half-dozen books crammed into his suitcase all about helping family cope with joint pain. “And I take the pills. They don’t help much, but I take them anyway, because I’m half-afraid you’re going to show up sometimes and count through them and paw through the trash like a bear.”

“Wait,” Marty said. “You’ve got bears?”

*

One year, Marty was supposed to show up in the morning and it got to be noon and then the clock hands crept closer to two. Rust checked his email three times, refreshing on an empty screen, and then went outside. He tucked his hands underneath his arms and breathed in and out, the air so cold it hurt his chest. It was like a disinfectant. He stood there thinking that if Marty didn’t come, or if he went back inside and there was an email from Maggie, he would make some kind of choice: choose the gun or the icy steps or the long walk into the woods.

But then a sleek rental car poked its nose over the curve of the road and he saw Marty at the wheel.

“Next time call if your flight’s delayed,” Rust said. “I could’ve run errands or something, I’d known you were going to be late.”

“Sorry to interfere with the busy workings of your day,” Marty said, eyebrows raised.

That whole visit, Rust touched him at odd intervals, like he had to constantly verify his existence. He’d had dreams almost that real and solid before.

*

“You need one of those Life-Alert things if you’re going to live out in the middle of nowhere,” Marty said, the year after Rust fell, told Marty about it, and immediately regretted telling Marty about it.

Rust pointed out there was a town, “including that motel you’re always acting like you wouldn’t be in a blue funk about going to if I threw you out,” and Marty said, “But by yourself, I mean. ‘Specially if you get eaten by a bear.”

*

“Maybe sometime I’ll come down,” Rust said.

“Yeah?” Marty said. “I’d like that. I really would. I’d roll out the red carpet for you. Take the trash out, even.”

He flicked the blanket up so it lapped against Rust’s ankles.

Rust said, “It was never about you. What I said, about bad years, and you being like a stampede, it wasn’t about that. I thought you’d get tired of me. And you didn’t need me. In a new context, I couldn’t—reciprocate, give you anything back. Not enough, anyway. That’s all.” He pushed his feet further under the blanket like he could shelter himself under those mountains and that sky. “I don’t know that any of that’s changed so much, if things would be different if you weren’t just visiting, but every time you’re due up here, I think about what I’d do if you didn’t come. And I’m not buying a fucking Life-Alert. But if I’m going to fall down, ever, I might as well do it closer to you. So if you want to stay, or if you want me to come back with you, we can do that.”

“Shit, Rust. That’s an easy choice. Home’s—”

“This can’t be about the bears again,” Rust said. “Tell me this is about your daughters and it’s not about the bears, because in your part of the world, we’ve already seen all the inhumanity visited by man upon his fellows, and I cannot sit here and listen to you go on again about the fucking bears.”

“The girls live closer to here now than they live to Louisiana,” Marty said. “I was trying to say here, okay? In spite of the fucking bears. Home’s only the one place. I got this blanket, I got Audrey’s painting, I got,” he waved his hand at Rust, “other stuff. We’ll get a shotgun for whatever else happens.”

“I’ve got a shotgun,” Rust said.

“See?” Marty said. “Then we’ve already got everything we need.”


End file.
